Thursday, May 23, 2013

4th grade artists learned about the renaissance as a time of discovery, exploration and invention. The ability to accurately and realistically portray 3D looking images on a 2d surface happened during the Renaissance. We looked at artwork prior to the Renaissance and compared it to old, 1980s video games. Both types of images had incorrect, distorted and weird attempts at portraying depth on a flat surface. We reviewed parallel, horizontal and vertical lines and drew our cities using one-point perspective and a vanishing point. We shaded in colored pencil, making one side of the building light and the other side dark.

Tuesday, May 21, 2013

First graders looked at the artwork of pop artist Wayne Thiebaud. He is famous for creating paintings of foods--mostly desserts. He paints realistically. We looked at his artwork discussed his use of the elements of art. The elements are line, shape, form, color, space, texture and value. We used all of these in our artwork. Can you find them?

Tuesday, May 7, 2013

These mixed-media Art projects feature first graders' understanding of the primary colors and how they are used to create the secondary colors. We looked at the paintings of Audrey flack. She was a pioneer in a style of painting known as photorealism. We looked at her painting of crayon a crayons. Why do they look so real? We noticed shadows and highlights and tints (lights) and shades (darks) of the same color. We drew our crayons by drawing cylinders first and then drawing a cone shape on top. We added details like the crayons stripe or the color name. We learned to shade with our crayons, pretending a spot light was shining on them, making one side lighter and one side darker, producing a cast shadow on the table next to each crayon. We then mixed liquid watercolors, in the primary colors, in a resist technique for our backgrounds. En la clase de Espanol, students looked at their artwork and wrote, in Spanish, about how many crayons they drew and how the mixed the primary colors.

These abstract paintings were created by kindergarten artist using liquid watercolors in the primary colors-red, yellow, and blue. Each square is a mini-painting where students explored and reviewed the primary colors and how to mix them together to create the secondary colors. The watercolor paper we used had masking tape on it, dividing it into sections. We used a watercolor technique called "wet on wet", where we first painted a small section of our paper with water, then added a drop of one primary color. Quickly we added a drop of a different primary color, right next to the first. Because the paper is still wet, the two colors simultaneously combined to make a secondary color.
After the paint dried and the tape was removed, we learned about pattern. We used sharpie markers to create patterns where the masking tape used to be.
Lastly, en la clase de Espanol, students talked about their artwork and wrote down, in Spanish, how they created their secondary colors.

Friday, May 3, 2013

Kindergarten artists learned about the life and artwork of Vincent Van Gogh. We looked carefully at his many sunflower paintings and talked about the colors he used. His colors were warm-yellows, oranges and reds. We used oil pastels and water colors for our sunflower paintings. We even signed our artwork on the vase, just like Van Gogh did.

Mr. K's Photo blog

10 things learned in Art

1. The arts teach children to make good judgments about qualitative relationships.Unlike much of the curriculum in which correct answers and rules prevail, in the arts, it is judgment rather than rules that prevail.

2. The arts teach children that problems can have more than one solutionand that questions can have more than one answer.

3. The arts celebrate multiple perspectives.One of their large lessons is that there are many ways to see and interpret the world.

4. The arts teach children that in complex forms of problem solving purposes are seldom fixed, but change with circumstance and opportunity.Learning in the arts requires the ability and a willingness to surrender to the unanticipated possibilities of the work as it unfolds.

5. The arts make vivid the fact that neither words in their literal form nor numbers exhaust what we can know. The limits of our language do not define the limits of our cognition.

6. The arts teach students that small differences can have large effects.The arts traffic in subtleties.

7. The arts teach students to think through and within a material.All art forms employ some means through which images become real.

8. The arts help children learn to say what cannot be said.When children are invited to disclose what a work of art helps them feel, they must reach into their poetic capacities to find the words that will do the job.

9. The arts enable us to have experience we can have from no other source and through such experience to discover the range and variety of what we are capable of feeling.

10. The arts' position in the school curriculum symbolizes to the young what adults believe is important.

SOURCE: Eisner, E. (2002). The Arts and the Creation of Mind, In Chapter 4, What the Arts Teach and How It Shows. (pp. 70-92). Yale University Press. Available from NAEA Publications. NAEA grants reprint permission for this excerpt from Ten Lessons with proper acknowledgment of its source and NAEA.